Why Solaris is the great­est sci­ence fic­tion film ever made

“We don’t want to con­quer space at all. We want to expand Earth end­less­ly. We don’t want oth­er worlds, we want a mir­ror.” These words, uttered by the dis­il­lu­sioned and para­noid Dr Snaut (Yuri Yarvet), paint in one sim­ple stroke the exis­ten­tial hor­ror and fright­en­ing truth of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 mag­num opus from Solaris. A film set aboard a lone­ly, half-aban­doned space sta­tion orbit­ing the equal­ly enig­mat­ic tit­u­lar plan­et, Solaris pro­vides a more prob­ing look into the nar­cis­sism of man than any film set on ter­ra firma.

One of the most cel­e­brat­ed film­mak­ers of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, Tarkovsky here melds gor­geous, stark visu­als with a med­i­ta­tive com­men­tary on our place in the uni­verse with­out miss­ing a beat. The director’s ear­li­er Andrei Rublev and lat­er Stalk­er both inter­ro­gate the philoso­phies of human­i­ty and the high­er orders that gov­ern our lives, with the for­mer rely­ing on bleak dystopia and the lat­ter a 15^th-cen­tu­ry Chris­t­ian Rus­sia to nav­i­gate the intri­ca­cies of faith. But it’s this sci­ence-fic­tion epic that man­ages to pack­age all of Tarkovsky’s exis­ten­tial anx­i­eties into a one-man ves­sel and sends it hurtling into the unknown.

Kris Kelvin (Donatas Ban­io­n­is) spends his remain­ing time on earth wan­der­ing the quaint coun­try­side near his child­hood home, sit­u­at­ed by an algae-cov­ered pond far from any cities. Kelvin, a psy­chol­o­gist, has been tasked with trav­el­ling to the Solaris space sta­tion to deter­mine why its spar­tan crew of three have begun com­mu­ni­cat­ing in gib­ber­ish, hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry mes­sages. Kelvin’s father knows that he will not live to see his son return from the dis­tant plan­et, and watch­es as Kelvin burns his pos­ses­sions in a final cleans­ing of his life on Earth.

From its poignant open­ing 20 min­utes, with Kelvin shed­ding his ties to his fam­i­ly and his past in the qui­et grove where he grew up, Solaris instant­ly estab­lish­es itself as a film about what it means to be human, and our rela­tion­ships with the world and those who inhab­it it. Aboard the space sta­tion, Kelvin is haunt­ed by a mirage of his late wife and mem­o­ries of his home, and the sui­cide of a pre­vi­ous sci­en­tist casts its long shad­ow through the emp­ty chrome cor­ri­dors. All the life in this film is hang­ing in the bal­ance, on the event hori­zon of a cat­a­clysm of identity.

It mat­ters not to Kelvin whether his wife’s dop­pel­gänger, who com­mit­ted sui­cide 10 years ear­li­er, is real or not. Whether she is a sim­u­lacrum, a man­i­fes­ta­tion of a decade’s worth of grief-strick­en mem­o­ries, or a celes­tial hal­lu­ci­na­tion, to Kelvin she is real. He can hold her, speak to her, and so he alone gives licence to her exis­tence. Tarkovsky extends this idea to all our rela­tion­ships, past and present, and asks us whether they real­ly exist at all. Do we love the peo­ple around us, or sim­ply how we per­ceive them? Is it the idea of them that sus­tains them, gives them life? How much do we real­ly know about some­one, save for our own men­tal colour­ing of their character?

Tarkovsky reg­u­lar­ly takes us to task on such fun­da­men­tal­ly upset­ting ideas, chal­leng­ing the fact that we may not be the cen­tre of every­thing after all. We may not even be the edges, but rather some sub­atom­ic notion of every­thing. Solaris is a film that doesn’t just stag­ger and con­found with its visu­al beau­ty and strik­ing set design, but the ideas behind every frame add up to far more than the con­stituent parts. It is not sim­ply the mag­num opus of an acclaimed direc­tor, but the bench­mark against which all sci-fi should be held account­able. No film before or since has placed such dev­as­tat­ing­ly human ideas into a place so devoid of life.

In the film’s breath­tak­ing final shot, when Kelvin seem­ing­ly returns home and finds his father tend­ing the same sleepy cab­in that he left behind, Tarkovsky opens the air­lock on his philo­soph­i­cal space sta­tion and lets the world in. Is all life one solip­sis­tic fever dream? Do we wake up and stare at some grand recon­struc­tion of a life, do we think with a con­science beamed from across the cos­mos? What is sim­u­lat­ed and what is real are, in Tarkovsky’s eyes, iden­ti­cal. As long as we believe some­thing exists, every­thing else is lost in the ether.